You can now create a checkinstall RPM by running it (note the full path):/usr/local/sbin/checkinstall

One more error...

As soon as an installation tries to do something with temporary files/directories, checkinstall will fail, for example, when running it for php-5.2.14: Installing PHP CLI binary: /usr/bin/
chmod: changing permissions of `/usr/bin/#INST@10957#': No such file or directory
The fix, apparently, is to run checkinstall with the --fstrans=no parameter, so for example:checkinstall -R -y --fstrans=no

And another...

Roman wrote to me the following (21 October 2011): Another bug, that line occurs in output:
cp: cannot stat `//var/tmp/tmp.tcgjDbWwz6/newfiles.tmp': No such file or directory
This is due to typo in "checkinstall": it using '/${TMP_DIR}/...' instead '${TMP_DIR}/...'
I suggest this fix before making rpm/deb package of checkinstall itself:
sed -i '.orig' -e 's/\/${TMP_DIR}/${TMP_DIR}/g' checkinstall

Compiling for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL6), x86_64

Sean Kenn got checkinstall to work under RHEL6, after these modifications (May 30, 2012) (LINE <nr> refers to the line number in the checkinstall file):

$INSTALLDIR variable was wrong (This could probably be fixed in the followlinks function but I just wrote the path out on this line): LINE 495: CHECKINSTALLRC=${CHECKINSTALLRC:-/usr/local/lib/checkinstall/checkinstallrc}

Another fix, for Fedora 17, x86_64

A user reported that for Fedora 17, x86_64, a line had to be changed in checkinstall-1.6.2/installwatch/Makefile: line 14, from:LIBDIR=$(PREFIX)/lib toLIBDIR=$(PREFIX)/lib64

Another user reported that this fix was also required for Fedora 15, x86_64. The error message he got when running checkinstall:ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/local/lib64/installwatch.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.